Dune: Part Two is kind of a corker for sure, but some moviegoers also felt it was brutally long, as we don’t get many near-three-hours epics these days anymore (with stuff like Avatar: The Way of Water and Napoleon being other recent exceptions). According to writer-director Denis Villeneuve, we missed out on at least a couple of pretty cool actors because he and the studio didn’t want the movie to overstay its welcome.
The filmmaker revealed “one of the most painful choices” he had to make while editing the movie during a chat with Entertainment Weekly, saying: “One of the most painful choices for me on this one was Thufir Hawat… He’s a character I absolutely love, but I decided right at the beginning that I was making a Bene Gesserit adaptation. That meant that Mentats are not as present as they should be, but it’s the nature of the adaptation.”
Villeneuve’s explanation for his absence is kind of a weird one, especially when the story being told is filled top to bottom with characters that aren’t directly related to the Bene Gesserit machinations. In Frank Herbert’s novel, the trusty House Atreides Mentat (they’re humans trained to serve as computers and solve logic issues) is forced to work for the Harkonnen after they take over Arrakis. In Dune: Part One, however, his fate was left up in the air, much like Gurney Halleck’s (Josh Brolin). The Atreides warrior does return in Part Two, so it was a bit weird not to see Thufir Hawat at least in one scene as well to highlight how House Harkonnen corrupts everything it touches.
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